The opening two-day sesshin was routine, too, until dokusan on Saturday. As usual I had no question, but the master had recently suggested that students should request dokusan even if it were only to tell him that we did not have a question since, he said, dokusan entailed the face to face intimacy essential to dharma transmission. That made sense I thought. It offered the teacher yet another opportunity so, when my turn came and I heard the ringing of the bell, with the obligatory bows I left my cushion and climbed the stairs and took my seat on the chair the master had arranged facing his own. His sore knees and legs no longer permitted him to sit cross-legged on his cushion and mat on the floor, and because the master wanted his students to be on the same level as he the master provided also a chair for them.
We bowed.
First I invited the master to speak.
"Is there anything you want to say to me?" I asked.
The master looked disgusted.
"No!"
"Is there anything you want to ask me?" I asked.
The master made a face.
"No!"
The master looked even more disgusted still, as if I were wasting his time.
I felt awkward.
Sheesh—
I had tried only to follow his instructions.
Now what?
"I'm having a good day," I said.
"Good."
We sat in silence for several seconds.
Hmm.
I had been thinking of my book.
The issue of both physical and verbal abuse in Zen was one of its themes; and the issue of verbal abuse by teacher and by student also arose regularly in classrooms at the college where I taught. I decided to ask the master about the serious students who had defected and left the temple—Mark, Daly, Ryan, Kent, Charles, Martin, and Ellen. I wondered, too, if the master discussed his students with Eleanor, the junior ino, and Edward, the senior ino, in the way the master had spoken to me of other students in the two years that I had served as ino. Did the master share with them his moral and psychological assessments?
I would inquire.
"Do you talk about me to other students?" I asked.
Surprise.
The master appeared startled by my question.
I waited.
He looked puzzled and it took him a moment to collect his thoughts and respond.
"Only positive things!" the master said.
He paused.
"I sometimes tell others that you have a strong home practice."
I nodded.
He was concerned.
He frowned.
"Have you heard something?" the master said.
Entreaty.
"No."
"Then why do you ask?"
"When I was ino you occasionally told me things about other students and their practice, nothing disparaging or mean, just casual comment and opinion, and I wondered if you volunteered the same kind of information and opinion about me now to Edward or to Eleanor."
"For example?" asked the master.
I thought.
"You told me once that Irene was mentally ill."
The master blushed.
"Did I use those words?"
"Yes."
"I shouldn't have," the master said. "I should not have used that language."
He paused.
"I should have said only that she had issues," he said.
Regret.
"What do you think of my including your remark in my book?" I asked.
He thought.
"If you think it would hurt her feelings then no," the master said.
Hmm.
The master ordinarily scoffed when students expressed concern about his hurting the feelings of other students—he was "honest," he was committed to "truth," he was "teaching," he was trying to "wake them up"—and in my book I planned to address this conduct in my consideration of abuse. But now the master was visibly sad and concerned about what he had said.
His regret was obviously sincere.
I waited.
"It was wrong for me to say that," the master said again.
This touched me.
Rue.
I remained silent.
I did not know what Irene might think of his remark. Irene made no secret of her struggle with depression.
Is a person depressed mentally ill?
Irene had told me one morning that the previous evening she had been on a suicide watch.
Would Irene object to her teacher, the master, characterizing her state of mind as mental illness?
Maybe.
Would she object to his telling me this?
I did not know.
Would my telling Irene of our discussion hurt her feelings?
Maybe.
I did not know that either.
Could I just flat out ask Irene what she thought of all this?
Maybe.
Would my doing so hurt the master's feelings?
I did not know.
Maybe.
It seemed complicated.
"Have I spoken to you of other students?" the master asked.
"Yes," I said.
His shoulders slumped and the master looked down.
He looked hurt.
"I try not to!" the master whined.
Now I felt bad.
"I know you do," I said.
I nodded.
I wanted to console and to encourage him.
"I do, too," I said.
At times like this my teacher treated me like his good friend.
He confided in me.
Yet if I suggested as much the master insisted that he was not and could not ever be my friend because he was my teacher.
To maintain this distinction seemed to me now unnecessarily difficult and cold.
It seemed too hard.
Why try?
Whatever the master did, it appeared, was "teaching," no matter what—but if his students did likewise it was wrong. To me this seemed hypocritical, I told him, like a double standard.
Did he not ever wonder, I inquired, why such good students, such obviously good people, left the temple?
"Do you think it is because of you that they are gone?" I asked.
This suggestion amused the master.
He smiled.
"I was told that Daly left because I made her mad," the master said.
He paused.
"But I didn't make her mad," he explained.
I waited.
"Anger arises," said the master.
Zen.
Understood.
Nothing "causes" emotion, mental formation.
It arises.
Everything causes it.
It arises from the matrix of infinite causes and conditions too complex and mysterious to decipher. All of the past is the collective cause of each instant of the present.
Everything that has gone before is present in "this."
Just this!
The master had not made Daly mad. Rather what the master had said or done was just one of the multiple causes and conditions from which anger had arisen for Daly. Such a formulation I sometimes called "buddhaspeak." Though I mocked it, it made sense to me. It held each of us responsible for our own emotion. Years before I had heard it put another way.
Drive all blames into the self.
I liked its simplicity.
I waited.
"I didn't make you mad," the master added.
I waited.
"Anger arises."
I listened.
"I didn't make Mark mad," the master said.
I waited.
"Anger arises."
I nodded.
"Some quit because of me," the master said.
I knew they had.
The master thought a moment.
"Some quit for other reasons."
I waited.
"Ryan said he quit because of verbal abuse and you know what I think of that!" he said.
"Yes."
"That's bullshit!" the master exclaimed.
Pissed.
The master had made himself angry.
Mad.
Anger arises.
By this reasoning it seemed that I could not hurt anyone's feelings nor make anyone mad by what I included in my book even if I tried.
Anger arises.
Hurt.
I wondered if the master would permit me to include this dialogue in my book. The master had told me no more than he had already told me before and I knew that he had told Ryan.
Had the master told others at the temple that Ryan's allegation of verbal abuse and mine were bullshit?
Hmm.
I supposed he had and I did not care.
It did not matter.
It was nothing the master had not told me to my face.
Twice.
It seemed the master could say to others whatever he felt like saying and if they believed his words had hurt them or angered them and made them mad, well, that was their misunderstanding.
He hadn't made them mad.
Hurt arises.
To the master it was teaching.
Zen.
I waited.
"I was told that Kent quit because he wanted to return to his Christian roots," he said.
Hm.
It was the first I had heard of it.
"It all comes down to trust," the master said. "The student must trust the teacher."
I was silent.
Trust in the teacher was a deep subject.
Indeed.
Like the subject of submission.
Trust.
"I've seen the email you sent to several members of the sangha about Sosan Davis."
"Yes."
"It was forwarded to me by a student who thought I should see it," the master said.
Tattling.
"I don't mind," I said.
The master wished to address the matter.
Fine.
"I don't mind."
Only later would I learn the reason perhaps why the master misunderstood and misinterpreted my remark—"hey, baby, want to get enlightened"—as offensive and much more judgmental and serious than I ever intended. To our relationship, I now believe in retrospect, the damage had already been done. But I did not yet know this and in my ignorance I brought to the subject still the same ironic amusement.
"It happens," the master announced.
I thought.
Oh.
The master meant sex between student and teacher.
The master explained that his friend and dharma brother Sosan Davis, a husband, father, and priest, had fallen in love with his student, herself married, and that Davis considered his lover his soul mate.
This story was not new.
The master had told me all of this two years before at the height of the scandal when Sosan Davis had come to the temple to consult with the master and had relinquished to the master his rakusu. The master had then also shown me a letter he had written to the Minnesota sangha to help them manage the scandal their teacher and master had precipitated.
"It happens."
I didn't need this lecture.
"It happens."
I knew very well how such a thing could happen.
I did.
The master knew I knew.
Yes.
I had informed him in my first year at the temple that in my first marriage I had been a serial adulterer, a pattern of sexual misconduct that had continued for twelve years and ended only when I began the practice of Buddhism. Married and the father of two children I had fallen in love with Ruth, a student of mine eleven years younger than I, divorced my wife, and married Ruth.
Yes.
Like every man I had ever met I knew how such a thing happened.
The master, much later, would tell others that I had been "pointing fingers" at Davis and that I had acted as if Davis were a pariah, but the truth is that my reaction was nothing like that at all.
I was amused by this failure of one more man in a long list of men I knew, myself and my friend Billy included, who had broken solemn religious vows of one kind or another and succumbed to desire, temptation, and opportunity.
If loving you is wrong
I don't want to be right
If loving you is wrong
I don't want to be right
There was a terrible sadness to it, too, of course, since many of my male friends and acquaintances over the years had like me been parents and had by their romances and affairs "caused" profound hurt and irreparable harm not only to their wives but also to their children.
In the master's friend Sosan Davis, I saw myself; in him I saw my teachers John and Billy, my friends Paul and Robert, I saw Stephen Gaskin, I saw Chögyam Trungpa, I saw Ösel Tendzin, I saw Richard Baker—in Davis I saw many many men, too many to mention here though I could list them by name—and there were also the dozens of Christian ministers and Catholic priests who had been publicly exposed and the dean of the Harvard Divinity School as well. I nodded and smiled not in judgment but in recognition, resignation, and acceptance.
"It happens," the master stated.
He waited.
"How sad and strange that men can promise lifelong fidelity to their wives and swear on holy books and practice religion and kneel and pray and meditate and 'sit' every day for years and years and years," I said finally, "and then still fail and fall and fuck a student."
"It happens!" the master stated.
"I know," I said, "but still—"
"It's hormones!" the master exclaimed.
I laughed.
"It happens!" the master insisted again.
I nodded.
"I know, I know," I laughed again. "I understand."
The master looked pissed.
He frowned.
"But I don't see how a man could present himself as a credible priest after that."
I wondered.
The master remained silent.
I waited.
The master was visibly sad but now he smiled.
I smiled.
"He doesn't have many students now," the master said.
In silence we sat and thought.
It felt calm.
"Katagiri fell in love with a student," the master said, "and they had a relationship."
Dainin Katagiri had been the master's teacher.
"Was he married?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Katagiri and his student kept it secret?"
"Yes," the master said.
I waited.
"The woman revealed it only after Katagiri had been dead ten years."
Hm.
"That made people mad," the master added. "Why reveal it then?"
I thought about it.
Well—
Why not then?
"I think there were other women, too," the master said.
I listened.
The master seemed pensive.
I waited.
"I was in a relationship with Nananda," the master said.
I waited.
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